1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and method for moving contents, particularly, to an apparatus and method for moving contents capable of moving contents having a restricted number of copies to another storage media.
2. Description of the Background Art
Recently, due to a rapid growth of computer and communication technologies, information and communication have become more important in everyday life as well as in science and business. Particularly, in the current information age, since every country in the world is constructing high-speed communications networks, various information will be provided, transmitted and consumed and a considerable part of such information will be secured by copyright laws.
Recorders, video recorders and copy machines using the analog method make differences in quality between the original and the copy in costs, time and convenience, and accordingly, those things do not significantly affect the copyright.
However, work on information and communication media such as the Internet significantly affect copyright laws since the copy and the original are 100% identical and through the Internet images and voices as well as texts can be transmitted to the entire world. Also, in the broadcasting field, the TV transmitting method is digitized by generalization of the digital compression technology and the development of inexpensive receivers, and accordingly, copying contents through broadcasting significantly affects copyright laws.
In the information age where all works such as images and records are digitized, infringement of copyright laws has become easy and is done in various forms, and accordingly, exposing and getting rid of infringement of copyright laws is difficult.
Therefore, since writing is decreased and distribution of intellectual property rights is hindered unless the infringement of intellectual properties is prevented or the technologies for exposing the infringement is prevented, enterprises related to copyrights are making significant efforts to develop copy protecting technology as a technological means to secure works.
In the present, as a general technology for protecting a copy, there is a method of restricting the number of copies to a certain number by inserting a copy control code in a header part of contents. The above technology will be applied to broadcasting contents as the digital broadcasting is popularized, and the technology is partly now in use.
FIG. 1 is a schematic block diagram showing a copy apparatus of a conventional digital broadcast receiver.
As shown in FIG. 1, the conventional digital broadcast receiver includes a TV broadcast receiver 100 for receiving contents which a broadcasting station transmits, and a recording apparatus 200 for storing the received contents.
The above TV broadcast receiver 100 includes a receiving unit 110 for receiving the contents, and a first storage medium 120 for storing the contents supplied from the receiving unit 110. Further, the recording apparatus 200 includes a second storage medium 210 for storing the contents transmitted from the first storage medium 120.
The operation of a copying apparatus for the conventional digital broadcasting receiver will be described with reference to accompanied drawings as follows.
The receiving unit 110 of a TV broadcasting receiver receives contents transmitted through transmission media such as a broadcast satellite or cable and stores the contents in the built-in first storage medium 120. At this time, the possible number of copies of the contents is decreased by one.
With the above storage method, the contents can be stored by the storage command of a user or new contents can be continuously stored by automatically deleting old contents at a certain time interval according to the composition of the TV broadcast receiver 100.
Later, when the user wants to copy the contents to the second storage medium, the TV broadcast receiver 100 reads the contents from the first storage medium and judges the possible number of copies by analyzing the copy control code inserted in the header part of the contents.
FIG. 3 is a view showing a packet including a header in accordance with a conventional data packet. A “DATA LENGTH” field specifies the length of the data field of a data block payload packets and data block packets; a “TAG” field provides a high-level label for the format of data carried by the packet; a “CHANNEL” field specifies the channel number for the packet; a “TCODE” field represents a transaction code, which specifies the packet format and the type of transaction to be performed; and an “SY” field represents a synchronization code, and is an application-specific control field.
At this time, as shown in FIG. 3, the copy control code uses 2 bits among 4 bits of synchronous bits in the header part of the data packet and is divided to an unrestricted copy, a restricted copy, a single copy and no copy according to the set values (00, 01, 10, 11). Also, the other 1 bit is used in an encryption code of the data stream and the least significant bit of the synchronous bits is a reserved bit and is not used.
Namely, as shown in FIG. 2, if the copy control code is set as an unrestricted copy (S201), the TV broadcast receiver 100 does not convert the copy control code and copies the contents to the second storage medium (S202 and S203). If the copy control code is set as restricted copy (S204), the receiver 100 stores the contents in the second storage medium 210 after decreasing by one from the possible number of copies and by converting the copy control code (S205 and S206). On the contrary, if the copy control code is set as no copy, the TV broadcast receiver 100 cannot copy the contents to the second storage medium regardless of the demand of the user (S207).
By the way, the first storage medium 120 is restricted in capacity. Therefore, if the copy control code is set to no copy in case the user of the digital broadcast receiver is willing to store the contents for a long time or edit the contents, a copying or editing of the contents from the first storage medium 120 to the second storage medium 210 is impossible.